


in the bright, bright starlight

by weakinteraction



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alien Planet, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Multi, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:29:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23970193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: A mysterious portal seems to offer a way out of a tight spot.But does it lead where the X-Men think it does?
Relationships: Jean Grey/Peter Maximoff/Scott Summers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	in the bright, bright starlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



> AU - story starts before Dark Phoenix.

The portal shimmered in front of them, a shifting vision of different places -- a jungle, the Sydney Opera House, a desert, the Eiffel Tower, an alien city where starscrapers were connected by strands of glass filigree, the Sydney Opera House.

Jean could feel it with her mind. It wasn't alive, not exactly. It wasn't sentient, not exactly. But something in it responded to her, and she to it.

"What even _is_ this thing?" Scott said. "And why is it locked away down here?"

"Does it matter?" Peter said. "We either go through it, or through _them_."

Outside, the sounds of the battering ram on the steel doors were getting louder. Scott had welded them shut with a few judicious optic blasts as soon as they'd realised that they'd retreated into a dead end, but they wouldn't hold forever.

Behind the battering ram was an entire battalion of Stryker's elite troops. They had already taken down four of their teammates. Tempting as it was to mount a full-frontal-assault-cum-rescue, the odds were not in their favour. They seemed to have some sort of way of suppressing mutant powers; short range, but horrifyingly effective within that range.

The portal was wavering again; for a moment, it showed a scene that Jean thought was familiar from her own memories, not just images she'd seen, but then it flickered away and was replaced by a landscape clearly not of this world -- dunes made of fine blue crystal, lit by twin suns. And then another: a view that seemed to be out of the window of some vast alien space station.

"Can you guys keep it down?" Jean said. "I'm _trying_ to concentrate."

"Wait," Peter said, "are you controlling that thing?"

"It's more like persuasion than control, I'd say," Jean said. "But it's very difficult, so _I need to concentrate_."

They stepped ahead of her, ready to defend her if the soldiers did break through, not needing telepathy to co-ordinate their actions, though using hers she could feel in both their minds the combination of determination to protect her and conviction that she would succeed. She let herself enjoy it for a moment, then pushed it away from her consciousness, devoting herself entirely to trying to re-establish whatever tenuous link she had made with the portal.

 _Westchester,_ she thought. The portal changed again -- there was grass and trees, but it could have been anywhere.

 _The mansion._ That was better: the portal showed, just for a moment, the imposing gates and the sign proclaiming it as Xavier's Academy. But then it flickered away again, replaced by a mountainside that could have been anywhere, on Earth or off.

 _Home._ Jean projected the thought with all her might, screwing her eyes tight shut.

A moment later, she heard Scott exclaim, "Jean, you did it!" She allowed her eyes to open for a moment and saw that she was right: just the other side of the portal was the grounds. Sunlight streamed through the hole in reality -- just a few steps would take them there.

An enormous crash announced the failure of the doors. Soldiers began to stream in, brandishing their rifles.

Peter grabbed hold of her hand, took Scott's with the other one. It was now or never.

And the only thought in Jean's mind as Peter pulled them through at superspeed was: _We need to get away._

* * *

The moment of blurred vision -- the combination of Peter's powers and whatever strange effects the portal itself had -- passed, and they found themselves surrounded by trees.

But not the ones that surrounded the lake back at the mansion; these were great tropical trees, covered in vines. Unfamiliar howls and screeches resounded from the upper branches.

"Where are we?" Jean asked.

"South America, perhaps?" Scott said. At her and Peter's sceptical looks, he muttered, "It's just a guess."

"At any rate, it's not the mansion," Peter said.

"But we're safe, for now," Scott said. "That's the important thing. We should find shelter before nightfall," he said. "Then we can worry about food."

Jean could see in Scott's mind the way he was parcelling things up into logical, manageable chunks. Exactly the sort of qualities that she knew made Professor X see him as a future team leader. But she could also see the way they were a coping mechanism for the panic that was roiling just below the level of his consciousness. What had happened to the rest of the team? What dangers awaited them here? Would they ever get home?

"You want me to scout around?" Peter asked, falling into line with Scott's plan. In other circumstances, he'd have been a pain in the ass for comic effect, but the seriousness of their being stranded seemed to be having an effect on him too -- or perhaps he was just recognising the effect it was having on Scott.

"It's dangerous for you to go alone," Jean said.

"Don't worry, sweetheart, I'm too fast for anything to catch me," Peter said.

Scott considered for a moment, then nodded. "Keep in mental contact with Jean," he said.

"Let's see if you can keep up with me," Peter said -- and there it was, just a leavening of his usual lightheartedness. He knew full well that it took all her concentration to read him when he was at speed. He also knew full well that she would be applying all her concentration in this situation.

"Be back soon," Jean said, and by the time she'd finished speaking he was gone.

Scott knew better than to interrupt her while she was focusing on Peter. She could feel his mind as a blur, going far too fast for her to keep up with every momentary impression. But he was helping her, repeating the same thought over and over even as he also took in everything he found in their surroundings -- _I love you._ \-- so that it was like the current in the rushing stream of his thoughts.

Only a minute or two later, Peter was back, and the jolt as his mind became fully readable again was far stronger than usual. She was suddenly seeing clearly everything he'd seen on his journey.

"OK," he said, "I think we're on a plateau; down below is an even thicker jungle than this. It's sheer drops down in three directions from here--" Jean feels Scott tense at the thought that Peter could have easily fallen to his death if he'd been careless; there was no way to outrun gravity "--and I think maybe even the other way as well, if I'd gone further. Like we're on some huge rocky outcrop."

"A mesa," Scott said.

"Sure," Peter said. "The nearest cliff is about a mile that way--" he pointed "--and has some caves near the top of it. There's a stream nearby as well. I think that's probably where we should hole up for the night. We can get thinking about something more elaborate later."

* * *

Jean kept telling herself that the walk was only as far as going from end of the mall to the other and back. But hiking through thick jungle was nowhere near the same as strolling between stores. The animal noises were growing fainter, lower in tone. But Jean still hadn't actually seen any creatures with her own eyes. It was almost as though they were all hiding.

Eventually, they found their way to the caves Peter had found and selected the one that had the best of the sunshine, and didn't have anything suggesting it was used by an animal. Jean levitated a boulder from the back of the cave into the middle, and Cyclops heated it with a long, low-intensity dose of his optic blasts.

"You're going to have to be careful not to break your glasses," Peter said, not altogether flippantly.

"We need food," Scott said. "Let's collect some fruit, I think that would be safest for now."

By the time they returned to the cave, the sun was low on the horizon.

As they sat around the heated boulder, discussing how best to prepare the hard-shelled fruits they had collected, which none of them recognised, Peter said, "I'm just going to pop outside. I gotta go ... I gotta go."

"I hadn't thought about sanitation," Scott said, still treating everything as a logistical problem to be solved.

"It's OK, Scott," Jean said, "we don't have to figure everything out all at once. It's not like we're going to be here for very long."

"You guys ..." Peter said when he returned from taking a leak. "I don't think we're in South America."

"What do you mean?"

"Come outside; I think you need to see for yourself."

They followed him outside.

The sun had set, and the stars had come out.

Millions of them.

Looking up at the night sky, Jean wondered how much of the bright daylight they had arrived into had actually been this starlight all along, only partially drowned out by the diffuse light from the sun. Directly ahead of them stars filled the sky, so much so that many of them could not be differentiated from one another, simply a massive, diffuse yellow-white ball in front of them. Streaking across the sky in both directions were long thin arms, closer to the Milky Way she was used to in the skies of Earth; away from that, the stars were more sparsely spread, though still more than she had ever seen before at once, even when the Professor -- Charles -- had insisted on taking her stargazing.

All three of them stood in silence for a long while. Jean was so lost in her thoughts -- of the X-Men, of everyone she had ever known -- that she realised she had no idea what Scott and Peter had been thinking, until Peter took her hand in his, and Scott's in the other, and led them back to the cave.

"We must be close to the core of the galaxy," Scott said, once they were back inside, huddled together. "If we're seeing the bulge filling half the sky like that. We may even be in its outer reaches." She could see the calculations dancing in his mind before he said, "I think we must be at least 20,000 light years away from Earth, roughly speaking, for it to be that prominent. Although, you know, this might not even be the Milky Way," Scott said. "If that thing had at least a range of kiloparsecs, there's nothing to say it couldn't have been megaparsecs. Hell, if it operated on some sort of expanded quantum wormhole principle, we might be anywhere in the universe."

Despite the warmth of the boulder, and Scott and Peter against her, Jean felt a sudden rush of coldness -- the unfathomable emptiness of intergalactic space.

"So if this is alien food, do we know if this is safe to eat?" Peter said, looking at the fruit dubiously.

"It might be worse than that," Jean said. "This planet must have a completely different evolutionary history; even if there are superficial similarities to Earth life because of convergent evolution in the same sorts of niches, the biochemistry at the cellular level might be completely different. There might not be anything here our bodies can process at all. Not a toxin, not a foodstuff, just nothing. We could starve to death in the midst of all this plenty." She waved a hand to indicate the jungle.

"Well, there's only one way to find out," Scott said. He picked up one of the fruit and cracked it open; a sticky mess oozed out.

It turned out to be delicious.

* * *

They discovered that this world had a much lower rotational period than Earth when the night lasted six days. Jean felt lucky that they still had some sense of Earth time thanks to Peter's wristwatch, which he insisted he had to wear, even on missions, so that he knew what pace he was keeping relative to normal time.

On the second day, the first creature bigger than an insect they had seen made its way into the cave. It looked like nothing Jean had ever seen on Earth -- either with her own eyes or in any textbook -- loping around on four sinuous tendril-limbs that seemed like they shouldn't be able to support its bulbous central body. Its skin, or was it fur, shone a shimmering silver colour in the starlight that streamed in continuously through the entrance to the cave. Jean couldn't immediately tell what senses it had -- there didn't seem to be a separate head part -- but she had the distinct sense that it was observing her. She had experimented with reading animals before -- dogs mostly -- but tended to shy away from the lurid simplicity of their thought processes, all competing drives with no strong organising principle to moderate them. With this creature, though, when she tried to read its mind, it was altogether too alien for her to be able to understand whatever cognition it might have.

After a while, the creature turned and went back outside; Jean was relieved that it did not seem to regard them as either a threat, or food.

By the fourth day, the temperature had dropped below freezing, and snow began to fall, sparkling and glowing in the bright starlight.

"Is this my fault?" Peter asked during one of the periods that their body clocks still insisted on treating as 'night'; he seemed uncharacteristically downbeat, both in his outward demeanour and his innermost consciousness. "Did my rushing us through interact with the portal in some way, throw us off course?"

Scott seemed to be considering the possibility seriously. Before he could say anything that would spark a fight, Jean said, "No. No," she repeated, detecting Scott's surprise at how firmly she was rejecting the hypothesis. She held out her hands to him. "It was me."

"What do you mean?"

"The attack-- As we were going through, I lost concentration. I wasn't thinking about getting home any more, I just wanted to get _away_. So it sent us away. All the way away."

She deliberately shut herself off from reading either of their minds for a while, allowed herself to be comforted by their words without knowing whether or not they were sincere.

Peter said, "You were incredible."

Scott said simply, "You saved us."

* * *

While they were waiting out the long night, uncertain exactly how long it was going to be, they had had plenty of time to plan.

When the light returned, they executed it, working hard in the sunshine that still streamed in, dawn-like, at the end of their first day's labour.

Peter insisted on calling the shelter "the treehouse", but it was much more than that, a multi-storey edifice with sufficient space for them to be together, and apart when they needed to be. The lowest storey was tall, acommodating a kitchen built around a large hearth, although there was no need for a chimney when they were heating rocks rather than burning fuel. Each subsequent storey was a little smaller and a little less tall, until finally the bedroom occupied the whole of the top floor, high up in the canopy. To build it, Scott felled carefully selected trees with his optic blasts, Peter chopped them up at speed, and then Jean telekinetically moved them into position. Between the three of them, they had it ready for occupation by the time the sun set again, though they still went back to the cave for rest, following the dictates of their own biorhythms -- and Peter's watch -- rather than any natural cues from their new environment.

When night did come, they were able to spend it in the treehouse, sleeping on a mattress of sorts that they had constructed of bound-together vines and stuffed with broad leaves.

As the night went on, a multitude of creatures like the one she had seen in the cave scurried out of burrows on the ground and up into the branches of the trees, where their limbs proved to be naturally adapted to clinging onto the branches. Jean smiled at them as they looked in through the windows at the new arrivals in their environment. They weren't really windows, of course -- Scott had longer-term plans about using his optic blasts to create glass from the sandstone in the cave, but for now they were simply openings in the walls, though able to be shuttered if necessary, for they had no idea whether the environment would remain this hospitable year round -- but the creatures still seemed to respect the boundary.

* * *

After that, it took two whole months -- Earth months; they still had no clear sense of the length of this planet's year, or the patterns of its seasons, if it had any at all -- to finish the beacon. It had been Scott's idea; he'd never voiced to Peter the thought that Jean could see in his mind clearly -- that they needed a project, a purpose other than survival, to keep themselves sane.

It wasn't really a beacon in the conventional sense. They cleared broad pathways through the jungle on top of the mesa, avenues as wide as Broadway that no automobile would ever be driven on. Scott had scoured the land clear of vegetation with his optic blasts; Jean had telekinetically constructed huge barriers from the smoking remains; and Peter shuttled back and forth at high speed, surveying to make sure they were remaining on track.

To Jean's surprise, it had been Peter who had suggested the pattern in which they laid it out: four led out from what they had established was the centre of the mesa at right angles to each other, where they connected up with a wide circular path that went all the way around the outside. If any passing aliens saw it, they hoped its neat geometry would be clear evidence of intelligent inhabitation.

And if, by some miracle, the X-Men ever made it out here, they would know that they had found their missing teammates.

"What do you think's going on back home?" Peter asked as they celebrated with hollowed-out gourds of fermented hardnut-juice. It had been Peter's idea to try making it, Jean who had perfected the technique ... and Scott who, slightly to Jean's surprise, turned out to be most enthusiastic about consuming it. But now the sticky-sweet drink -- Jean imagined it must be similar to mead, although she had only the faintest idea what mead actually was -- had loosened Peter's tongue, and made him speak the thought that they had all kept silent until now.

"They'll have dealt with Stryker," Scott said confidently. "Rescued the others."

"But what about us?" Peter said. "Are they still looking? Or did they think he got us? That we're locked up in some lab somewhere." His voice quietened to a whisper. "Or dead."

"If they thought we were captured," Scott said, "they wouldn't stop until they found us."

Jean could see what he was thinking, though: that if they thought the three of them were dead, they might not think there were any bodies to find. And that if they _had_ defeated Stryker, as he hoped, they would not think they had been turned into lab rats.

"I just don't like the idea of them wasting time looking for us," Peter said.

The conversation moved on to other, lighter topics; they talked about Earth for the first time without inhibition, not as a comparison for their new environment but simply as the place they had come from, where they had grown up, met one another.

When, several gourds each later, they fell into bed together and made love, it was with both a tenderness and a vigour that had not been possible before that conversation. Before she followed Peter and Scott into sleep, Jean subliminally planted a vision in their minds: a subtly altered memory of the grounds of the X-Mansion, their names added to the memorial as "missing", the other X-Men standing solemnly around.

* * *

The battery in Peter's watch finally died after five years, four months and three days ... in Earth time. As far as they could tell, their new home hadn't even made one orbit around its sun yet.

They kept the wide paths they'd made through the jungle for the beacon clear, day-week after day-week, despite the fact that none of them still held out any realistic hope of rescue. But they had grown used to it as part of the rhythm of their lives, and it served to help them remember that there was a wider universe out there, even if they were cut off from it now.

Night had long since become Jean's favourite time -- the strange nocturnal creatures that ruled the night-week while the diurnal ones underwent a sort of mini-hibernation felt to her like kindred spirits somehow. Not that the difference between day and night was anywhere near as pronounced as it was on Earth; the glowing light of the galactic core -- whichever galaxy it was -- made sure of that. But more than that, the giant nuclear furnaces that were the stars making it up seemed to call to her, an enormous power of both creation and destruction.

"What are you thinking about?" Scott asked, climbing out onto the roof of the treehouse.

"I was remembering the cave," Jean said. "That first night that seemed like it wouldn't end."

"Well, we're doing better now," Scott said.

Peter climbed up too. "It's still amazing," he said.

"Do you still think about Earth?" Scott asked.

Jean didn't want to tell the truth: how she knew that both of them did, how every time she brushed against the memories they were recalling it was like another stab of pain. "Of course," she said. "But this is home now."

But even if they'd known to ask, she wouldn't have been able to tell them whether she meant the planet, or the universe.


End file.
